Whigs and Tories: Party Representation in English and Welsh Constituencies, 1690-1740 Dan Bogart Department of Economics, UC Irvine [email protected] This Draft December 2013 Abstract The Whig and Tory parties played an important role in British politics in the decades following the Glorious Revolution. This paper builds on the The History of Parliament and introduces new data on the political affiliation of all MPs serving in England and Wales between 1690 and 1740. It then measures the strength of Whig and Tory representation across English and Welsh constituencies and for the first time present maps of party representation. The Whigs are shown to be more strongly represented in southeastern municipal boroughs, especially those with small or narrow electorates. The Tories were strongest in Midland counties and were weaker in counties with a higher percentage of dissenters from the Church of England. The patterns are broadly similar during the Rage of Party (1690 to 1721) and the Walpole Era (1722 to 1740). The main difference is that the Whigs lost strength in the North and gained in Wales during the Walpole Era. The Whigs also lost strength in counties with more dissenters. JEL Code: N43, P16, D72 Keywords: Political Parties, Whigs, Tories, Rage of Party, Walpole, Glorious Revolution 1 I would like to thank the many research assistants who helped on this project, specifically Robert Oandasan, Dorothy Cheng, Amanda Compton, Alina Shiotsu, Tom Wheeler, and Larry Bush. 0 Britain’s transition to more representative government following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 exposed divisions within society. The most poignant example is the conflict between the Whigs and Tories. Political parties emerged in the 1670s and 80s during the Exclusion crisis. The Whigs favored excluding James Stuart from the throne because of his Catholicism and views on the monarchy. The Tories formed to oppose exclusion because it represented too great an incursion into royal authority. After the Glorious Revolution, the Whigs and Tories were engaged in a frequent and close struggle for control over the House Commons. During the ‘Rage of Party’, between 1690 and 1714, there were ten elections and the majority party in the Commons changed six times. Party conflict was fueled by differences in economic and social interests. The Tories represented a significant portion of the landowning interest and on national issues they protected the interests of the Church of England and favored lower taxes. The Whigs generally represented larger landowners and financial interests. They favored religious toleration for dissenters from the Church of England and an aggressive foreign policy supported by a well- funded army. The two parties also differed in leadership. The Tories’ best known leader was Robert Harley who served as Lord Treasurer from 1711 to 1714. The Whigs were led by a small group known as the ‘Junto’ who dominated the king’s ministry for much of the 1690s. There was a significant turn in British politics after 1715 when the intensity of party competition weakened and changed in character. The Tories were damaged by their links with the failed Rebellion of 1715, which aimed to overthrow the Hanoverian monarchy and reinstall James Stuart to the throne. Religious tensions also weakened, giving less salience to the Tory critique of ‘Church in Danger’. The emergence of Robert Walpole as the leader of the Whig party was another important development. Walpole used the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion to portray the Tories as a threat to the Revolutionary settlement of 1689. Walpole also courted a new group 1 of Whigs by offering government offices and other perks. Walpole was successful in that he helped to maintain a Whig majority in the Commons from 1721 to 1743, but he could not keep all Whigs tied to his government. Some became dissatisfied and formed a group known as the Opposition Whigs in the early 1730s. It was the beginning of the party disintegration that was commonplace in the mid eighteenth century. The shifting fortunes of the Whig and Tory parties are thought to be crucial to the evolution of Britain’s policies after the Glorious Revolution. In their studies of politics under King William and Queen Anne, Horowitz (1977) and Holmes (1967) show how the relative influence of the Whigs and Tories influenced the fate of key bills in the Commons. Pincus (2009) extends this view and argues that the Whigs and Tories had fundamentally different visions of political economy, leading the Whigs to adopt policies favoring a manufacturing economy and the Tories an agrarian economy. David Stasavage (2003) has made a similar argument that Whig majorities signaled a more credible commitment to protect the rights of government bondholders compared to Tory majorities. Collectively such works have severely questioned the view of historians, like Walcott (1956), who argue that parties were largely irrelevant for policy making. Although Britain’s early political parties have been extensively studied and discussed there is still much that is not known, especially concerning their representation across constituencies. The aim of this paper is to provide a new quantitative basis for the study of Britain’s early political parties. Much of the recent literature makes use of The History of Parliament, a series of volumes devoted to the histories of individual Members of Parliament, constituencies, and parliaments. The most recent edition, The House of Commons: 1690-1714, edited by Cruickshanks, Handley, and Hayton (2002), makes a number of key contributions to our collective knowledge of politics during the Rage of Party. First, it estimates party strength across 2 parliaments. Second, it provides a narrative of electoral politics in each constituency. Third, it gives a biography of every Member of Parliament (henceforth MP) in the House of Commons from 1690 to 1715. The House of Commons: 1690-1714 is an impressive work and historians owe a great debt to its editors and contributors. Nevertheless there is a significant limitation in the data it provides. In the introductory survey, Hayton (2002) gives the total number of MPs in each party and in each parliament but does not provide tabular data on the party affiliation of each MP. In other words, nowhere in their volume can one find a list of MPs by name and by party. The same data limitation applies to the subsequent edition, The House of Commons: 1715- 1754, edited by Sedgwick (1970). Total counts of Whig, Tory, and Opposition Whig MPs are given in each parliament from 1715 to 1741, but not in tabular form for individual MPs. Speck’s (1970) study of party politics in English and Welsh constituencies also suffers from the same problem. Speck gives electoral totals for each party from 1701 to 1715 and provides a list of safe seats for each party, yet no data on individual MPs is given to reconstruct these figures. This paper addresses this issue by introducing newly created data on the political affiliation of all MPs serving constituencies in England and Wales between 1690 and 1740. Specifically the data codes whether every MP was part of the majority party in each parliament. The interest in the majority party stems from the idea that it usually has a great advantage in implementing its legislative goals compared to opposition parties. The early eighteenth century was also the period when the ministry became inter-connected with the majority party in the Commons (Cox 2011). The strength of the Whig and Tory parties across constituencies is also of interest. Various theories on where and in which types of constituencies each party drew its electoral strength are tested. The differences between the Rage of Party and the Walpole Era are also of interest as politics changed over this period. 3 Like previous studies, this paper uses division lists to identify party affiliation. One type of division list addresses a particular bill of importance, like the Peerage bill of 1719, and identifies which MPs voted for or against. A second type of division list comes from party leaders who list all MPs that belong to their party or are considered reliable. An example is the Worsley List which classifies the party affiliation of all MPs in the 1713 and 1715 parliaments. Although extremely valuable, the problem with these sources is that MPs may not fit the Whig or Tory model of voting on all division lists in a parliament. To address this issue an algorithm is developed that combines information from two or more division lists. The approach here is ‘conservative’ in that majority party status is assigned only to MPs who never deviate from the majority party line for all division lists in a parliament. As a robustness check the size and composition of the majority party is examined when MPs are allowed to deviate from the majority once in a Parliament or when less divisive bills are dropped. The new classification of party representation shows that a ‘true’ majority party (having more than 50 percent of MPs in the Commons) existed in 5 of the 14 of the parliaments from 1690 to 1740. The Tories had a true majority in the 1702, 1710, and 1713 parliaments. The Whigs had a true majority in the 1708 and 1722 parliaments. In 5 of the 14 parliaments the largest party was very close to a majority with at least 46 percent of MPs belonging to it. In the 4 remaining parliaments the largest party had between 37 and 43 percent of MPs affiliated. These included the 1690 parliament when parties were re-forming after the Revolution, the two short- lived parliaments of 1701, and the 1715 parliament which was unusual as explained below. Perhaps the most important contribution of this paper is a new summary statistic for Whig and Tory Party Strength in all English and Welsh constituencies between 1690 and 1740.